The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone

If this is an American article, as it seems to be, then no worries.  The U.S. is in no danger whatsoever of everyone affording college.

NR, you keep posting this anti-intellectual nonsense over and over. Why is that? Are you feeling insecure?

Anyway, you're expressing a myopic point of view and posing a question that's been asked and answered about twenty times over. No-one has said everyone should have to go to university (although it wouldn't hurt if they did). People who go to university don't fare less well in the long run than tradespeople.

It's certainly true that for a long time, in Canada at least, post-secondary education is practially an assumption for high-school grads.  I recall that when I was 19, the question wasn't "do you want to go to University?" but rather "which Universities did you apply to?"  Everyone -- including parents! -- just assumed it was the ticket to prosperity for everyone, whether it was a good fit or not.

But I'm not sure that "the swing of the pendulum" to where everyone assumes that pipefitter's papers are the ticket to prosperity for everyone, whether it's a good fit or not.

Again, for all sorts of reasons, I don't think we need to worry that everyone's going to go to University.  And FWIW, the fewer people who become, say, welders, the more lucrative being a welder will be. 

Magoo, I think your experience is partly a class thing. There were few people in my high school who seriously considered university, most just got a job or headed to trade school. I'm guessing 15% of us went to university. In contrast, my cousin's school had a majority of kids go to uni, but they lived south of the tracks. 

Oh, I did necessarily mean very rich people - my high school was very blue collar workers' kids. The more middle class kids went to university. Our career counsellor was very concerned that I'd find university difficult to adapt to because my dad was in the trades and my mum hadn't finished high school. 

Is there an emoji for asked and answered?

I'm sure there are some discussion boards and media where people in the trades are looked down upon - say in the Globe and Mail, but a fairly down-to-earth leftish site like this one isn't one of them.

I'm very proud of what we have achieved here with the CÉGEP system, with some highly-qualified trades streams, but in which the students must also take some academic courses, such as history, the other official language and their own, as well as some relating to maths or sciences (including the now essential computer knowledge). This is because it was considered essential to "citoyenneté": citizenship, but in the sense of informed participation in society.

Nowadays, there are very few trades that don't require computer literacy and other knowledge that was arcane 50 years ago. For example, school caretakers/janitors or whatever that trade is called now require systems knowledge to do their job.

I thought the police officer vs the building worker was an odd example; while police do attend police college now, most are not highly educated in the academic sense, and building workers now have to take far more specialized trades training than their grandfathers did. On the contrary, it is how the ruling class views the ROLE of the police in the social order that makes their deaths somehow more tragic than those of other workers. Yes, police work is essential to public safety, but so is sanitation...

Another interesting aspect is how important popular education has been for many labour and popular movements, and a shorter working day meant more repose, but also more time to study (in all senses). The workers' movements did not always think that learning to read and write (beyond basic literacy, also in terms of being able to access literature) was a futility reserved for the upper or upper-middle-class. Especially in times of progress and upturns in the workers' movements, all kinds of education were very much a demand (I'm thinking of the Italian movement in 1969, in the wake of the French and other 1968 wave, but there are countless other examples around the world).

We need people to be able to go into the trades if THEY wish.  We need people in and out of the trades to have the chance to stretch themselves through university education.  We also need to get back to the idea that learning was a good in itself, that it shouldn't HAVE to be tied to the question of employability.  

It doesn't have to be "either/or", and I have no idea where North gets this idea that people who support free university education look down on people in the trades or have it in for the trades as a series of occupations.

College should be for the the upper-classes. That's why we have established elite institutions for the best, brightest and most polished amongst us like Oxford, Cambridge, Eton, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Exeter, etc,... Once you let the riffraff in who knows what will become of society.

Ken Burch wrote:

It doesn't have to be "either/or", and I have no idea where North gets this idea that people who support free university education look down on people in the trades or have it in for the trades as a series of occupations.

It's a fascinating example of modern-day class enforcement. When I was in high school in the USA, military recruiters would target poor minority students who weren't doing well academically with similar rhetoric about how going to war was somehow more authentic than going to university. The basic idea seems to be that people have to be deprived of other opportunities in order to fill necessary career niches, which dovetails nicely with the desire of the upper class to avoid using the most traditional capitalist mechanism for recruiting people to the job you need filled. In other words: If Canada has a shortage of plumbers, the answer is neither discouraging higher education nor importing TFWs, but raising plumbers' wages. (Here in Québec, the recent bloviating about a "labour shortage" and discussion of bribing people to have children has conspicuously ignored the same mechanism.)

The preponderance of complaints from business groups about labour shortages appears to suggest that their first instinct is to demand the government provide them a more deprived workforce. Hence, the previous existence of the TFW program.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

Quote:

That's why we have established elite institutions for the best, brightest and most polished amongst us like Oxford, Cambridge, Eton, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Exeter, etc,... Once you let the riffraff in who knows what will become of society.

Are you posting from the UK?

Because trust me, you can be a bit of a dullard and still get into "college" in Canada.

In Canada you say?...pity.

WWWTT wrote:

I’m a plumber. UA local 46  also a builder  

i want my kids going to university. But when they get old enough, I want to teach them how to build a house. What I feel is the most important thing is that we all find something we like to do that is contributing to our society no matter what and we all have an equal opportunity with no barriers of class race color sex money background etc etc. 

With you on that.  It's important that we don't lose the ability to actually MAKE things.

I've heard the same line about workers, unions and union militants...

And then, suddenly (or so it seems) a movement emerges!

The point I will grant is that there is still a significant bias in large portions of society that university is the path to success (however you define success). Outside our echo chamber of course...

Henry Ford was a supporter of Adolf Hitler. But he also knew that if his workers could afford his cars, many of them would buy them. So he raised his workers' wages, and many of them bought his cars. 

Now we are in a race to the bottom. Unskilled work pays minimum wage or barely more. With rent and bills, it means people can only afford things made by real slaves in Bangladesh and wage slaves in many other countries. Companies like Sears are going belly up but the lineups at the dollar stores are longer than ever. This stuff is imported by the containerload, and is rarely inspected by the Canadian government for toxic content. 

With rising inequality, it is prosperity for the rich and depression for the poor. When you average it out, we have apparent economic growth. 

Maybe we have hit bottom. We are chronically underinvested per worker. The extreme right is exploiting this situation by blaming immigrants, the Illuminati, etc. People who want simple explanations for complex and seemingly intractable problems fall prey to this rhetoric from the gutter. 

The solution to the depression which is affecting the majority of us is Keynsian. Tax the rich, and spend the money on public works and income supports. It worked before, and it will also work again. In addition we need to raise punitive tariffs on countries which permit slavery and crass exploitation and adopt currency controls and withholding taxes on money destined for tax havens. 

The obsession with foreign trade is not borne out by its percentage of GDP. The vast majority of GDP is government, consumer, and domestic business spending. We should focus on those things and determine to build a domestic Canadian economy for Canadians. 

NorthReport wrote:

Worth repeating. Thanks Pogo.

Pogo wrote:

The point I will grant is that there is still a significant bias in large portions of society that university is the path to success (however you define success). Outside our echo chamber of course...

There is a difference, however, between those who say that university is "THE path to success"-in terms of employability-and those who argue for free or nearly-free university education because everyone should access to a life of the mind, who feel that education is a liberating good in and of itself.  

And we simply don't HAVE to choose between free college and the opportunity to learn a trade.  Why can't a decent society make both available?